Wireline and wireless Internet protocol (IP) networks have traditionally supported a best effort delivery of all traffic. To support enhanced services, multiple types, or classes, of services have been established and assigned certain quality of service (QoS)
parameters that manage queues for each service type. The QoS parameters include delay, jitter, error rates, and throughput. The QoS parameters can be provisioned on a per IP connection or per flow basis through mechanisms such as resource reservation protocol (RSVP) or can be provisioned on aggregate flow which are classified into service classes. Internet service providers (ISPs) can utilize the service classes, their associate QoS behavior and QoS provisioning to provide multiple service offerings to their business and consumer customers.
The IP-QoS architecture provides congestion control tools that work closely with traffic shaping, admission control and coordinated policing tools to control and shape the traffic of various IP flows and to insure QoS behavior for each class of service. The goal of congestion control is to adapt the sending rate of data at its source to match the bandwidth available at a network node. Thus, as the bandwidth availability or the demand for bandwidth changes in a network, the data sources are controlled to adapt their sending rate to the bandwidth changes.
Traffic shaping and policing are performed at the network nodes. Traffic shaping is typically implemented using a token, or leaky bucket. The token bucket is sized in accordance with a burst rate of the traffic and is filled with tokens at a long-term average rate of the available supply or bandwidth. Traffic is policed by requiring packets to check-out tokens from the bucket for transmission.
To support flows having disparate QoS parameters, multiple token buckets have been used in a network node to police and control the disparate QoS flows. Each token bucket is sized and configured at a rate corresponding to the QoS parameters of an associated flow. While the use of multiple token buckets supports disparate flow types, the token buckets are not sensitive to the characteristics of the radio frequency (RF) wireless environment in which different flow types have different impact on the media/physical layer and have a different interference impact based on location of the flow.